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Ilya Startsev

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Everything posted by Ilya Startsev

  1. I believe Kant dressed a commonsensical philosophy, in some ways near to Rand's, in academese. On a tangential note, Nietzsche wrote:
  2. I can't do anything here but agree with Rand concerning the connection between Newton and Aristotle. Yet I explain the connection differently. Both of them, although used different rules of description, accepted reality as an ontological given. Yes, Aristotle viewed reality teleologically to describe its mechanics. Interestingly, so did Newton, as he also mystically described reality in his Alchemical Papers. We can also independently verify the connection by evaluating these two factors: Kant's antifoundationalism, particularly as found in his The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762) and Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (1763), meaning he intentionally contradicted Aristotle. Kant's congruence with quantum physics as seen in the ways of thinking of the leading quantum physicists: Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, and Alan Guth. The idea is to reduce the universe to sensations being material particles, represented and structured in mathematical language. These particles do not follow laws of ontological logic. If 1 and 2 are true, then Kant contradicts Aristotle and Newton. And since we also know that Aristotle and Newton are contradicted by quantum physics, we can realign the connections, contra the academically accepted, in sync with Rand.
  3. That's 5b from the OP. This is not accepted by most academicians. Rand's genius was in seeing that Kant is congruent with quantum physics, whereas most academicians think he isn't because they connect Kant to Newton. In contrast to them, Rand connects Newton to Aristotle, hence the opposing connections. Additionally (edit): academicians think that Newton contradicts Aristotle because Aristotle's physics was non-experimental and logical, whereas Newton's physics was experimental (empirical) and mathematical. It is academically accepted that euclidean and non-euclidean geometries contradict each other. Yet I am still confused as to why so many philosophers, like M. Schlick, H. Reichenbach, and T. Oizerman, believed that Kant's a priori space was contradicted by Einstein's spacetime continuum, which itself was similarly ideal and empirical. Kant only explicitly mentioned that a line is the shortest distance between two points and that space has three dimensions, both are factual statements in euclidean as well as non-euclidean geometries. As for politics, I think Kant is represented by the likes of John Stuart Mill, on whose political philosophy EU and, in particular, the Scandinavian model are based and whose examples are set as the goal for America by liberals. Egalitarianism by John Rawls is also Kantian in nature, hence the kind of tolerance presented by Social Justice Warriors is also in order.
  4. As for the "functional sense", here is Aristotelian synergy in electrical engineering, taken from Konrad Lorenz's Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge, Ch. 2.2.
  5. I don't know about you, but I agree with this quote by Aristotle:
  6. Because once you quantify something, it won't be the whole. What's the difference between 'every thing' and 'everything'?
  7. For my Master's thesis I may choose to work on the issue of integrating post-Kantian philosophy with modern, post-Einsteinian science. It is peculiar, however, to find that not only Kantian a priori are contradicted by empirically valid non-euclidean geometry at the foundation of the theory of relativity but that also Ayn Rand is similarly incompatible with the latter theory. Perhaps there could be something with the concept of the "relativized a priori" coined by Reichenbach and exhibited in Padovani's "Relativizing the relativized a priori: Reichenbach’s axioms of coordination divided".
  8. Let me rephrase that. Kant used scientific reason to oppose philosophy. Philosophy is not a science. Kant projected science on philosophy (and religion) and hence reduced philosophy to a scientific worldview, reflected in the third positivism of Frege, Russell, Carnap, and Wittgenstein, all of whom cherished Kant. Kant was a scientist and only thought of mathematics in the scientific sense as applied to matter. In contrast to Kant, Plato was a philosopher and not a scientist. He projected philosophy on science (and mythology). Mathematicians and science-minded philosophers like Cantor, Whitehead, Quine, and Gödel are in this group along with Plato. Plato was a philosopher and only thought of mathematics in the philosophical sense as independent from matter. Here is a way to connect them: Frege, Russell, Carnap, Wittgenstein Cantor, Whitehead, Quine, Gödel Rand, on the other hand, was a philosopher who wanted to connect philosophy with science without projecting one on the other. We have yet to see a science based on Rand's foundational philosophy. My guess is that this kind of science has yet to be born out of philosophy and be separated from it to become a full-fledged science in its own right.
  9. Concerning Kant's epistemology, I've found this diagram on his page of German Wikipedia. Basically his theory goes through several confused and muddled stages, as far as I can understand it: first, our sense organs (Sinne) are affected, then we feel sensations (Empfindungen), then with help of imagination (Vostellungen) through time and space we experience phenomena (Erscheinungen), then with help of categories and rules of "productive imagination" (Produktive Einbildunsgkraft) we form concepts (Begriffe), and finally with help of "schemes" of the same "productive imagination" and our reason we form judgments (Urteile). Not only is imagination hereby confused with sensations, perceptions, and concepts (i.e., Vostellungen and Einbildunsgkraft), but the entire diagram doesn't follow the passage of pure reason to practical reason through the maxims and categorical imperative, the connection which would unite the thing-in-itself (Dinge an sich) with the postulates (Regulative Ideen). Please correct me if I am wrong, but this seems to be Kant in a nutshell. If Peikoff was wrong about the disintegration of epistemology and philosophy in general by Kant, then I am a tram(p) who knows nothing. To those of you who think that Kant was anti-reason, think again. He was rather anti-philosophy. His reason is way beyond what Objectivists are generally accustomed to.
  10. In terms of increasing complexity that is given to the problem of perception, I would rate these in the following way: Illusion (partial misperception) Misjudgment (misperception of a real object) Hallucination (misperception of an unreal object) Lucid dream (misjudgment of an unreal object)
  11. I've noticed that hallucinations are not limited to their creation by brain states under hallucinogenic drugs or in schizophrenia but in us normal human beings as well. For example, I was watching a walk-through of a video game called >observer_ and I noticed a man standing on the balcony there. Then I rewound the video and noticed him again and yet realized that it was not a man, as he wasn't moving, and it was probably just light effects (which are everywhere in the game). There are two ideas here. First, Smith's (visual) kinestetic basic perceptual state, which allows us to experience perception in the first place by virtue of movement of objects in respect to us. Since this failed, I realized that the man wasn't real in the game. The second idea is that we need appropriate conditions, as well as for the place where you experience the effect of drugs (usually at night or in a specially lighted place), and in this game psychological and hallucinogenic factors are significant. I made myself believe there was a man but partially I was also convinced by the presence of a particular cluster of sense data there which I could associate with the figure of a man. Of course it would be easier to experience a hallucination under drugs, but my point is that you don't have to, and thus there is no necessary influence by a hallucinogen or a mental illness for such an experience to occur. Although hallucinations are much more rare than illusions in the normal state, they are certainly possible and occur with everyone. Concerning the discussion by Binswanger in Perception about a pencil being viewed as bent in the water: whenever we say or think that there is something wrong with the pencil and that it doesn't look like a normal pencil, it's a case of misjudgment rather than merely an illusion or a hallucination. I differentiate all three and think that all three are significant when it comes to problems of acquiring knowledge. Another, similar example is an ancient one from India: are we seeing a snake or a rope in front of us? If we look closer we notice that it's a rope and not a snake. So seeing the snake in place of the rope was an instance of a misjudgment, which is similar to hallucination in that it is also a misintegration of sense data, but it's also different from a hallucination in that a hallucinated object doesn't actually exist there, whereas for a misjudgment a rope or a pencil does, in place of what you saw. So a hallucination is a more significant misintegration of sense data because it actually "creates" rather than simply erroneously transforms an object, but such a creation still has conditions, even though these conditions are not limited to the presence of an object. Misjudgment requires an object, whereas a hallucination requires specifically colored or sensed sense data. Another thing I thought about when I analyzed hallucination is whether it could be compared to lucid dreams. In movies like Waking Life (2001) it seems like the character experiences hallucinations, but he doesn't, if we believe the scenario. We know from cases of lucid dreams (which I never experienced myself), such as in the book I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics by Daniel Kolak (an expert on lucid dreams, among other things), that lucid dreaming is a conscious state in which we think we are experiencing something that seems very real but in fact, on closer observation, isn't so. The main difference between hallucinations and lucid dream states, then, is that in hallucination we are experiencing something real (the sense data are coming from outside of our brain), whereas in lucid dreams all experience is internal and there are no sense data that are genuinely real, only thought so. Perhaps a lucid dream state is a state when misjudgment is applied to internally existing objects, so it's more complex than a mere hallucination. But, honestly, I wouldn't know unless I experience such a state firsthand.
  12. Based on my personal experience of hallucination, I would say that the cause of hallucination is misintegration of sense data through association with a percept of an object that doesn’t exist anywhere other than in the head of the hallucinator.
  13. Smith's third failure is his misunderstanding of hallucination. He writes: I've taken hallucinogenic mushrooms and can tell from experience that a hallucination necessarily involves actual sense-data in order to occur, so the external sense-data are "integrated" into a "percept" of an object that doesn't exist. The example he mentions is impossible for a genuine hallucination: It seems that the author has watched too many movies about pseudo-hallucinations and believed them too well.
  14. Besides, the only way you could integrate (or manipulate in other ways) sensations is if they were thoughts.
  15. I also want to stress that a sensation can be considered a thought only when it exists within the brain of an animal. Sensations also belong to plants, but obviously not as thoughts, since plants don't have brains.
  16. The second and even bigger failure of Smith is his confusion of Anstoss, or "sheer force, or renitency" (p. 165), which he takes from Fichte's Not-I, with mere air (friction, resistance, pressure). Or really his confusion that he doesn't view it as such and yet takes it as the ultimate solution.
  17. Besides adding "or the constant noise or ringing happening in the background" to this passage, I'd also like to stress that this sensation of light or "light-show" as A. D. Smith calls it in his The Problem of Perception, is internal, rather than external, also implying that seeing darkness is a type of sensation rather than nothing. Additionally I would like to also differentiate between sensations of which we are unaware and sensations of which we are aware but not conscious: We may be not aware of these thoughts, such as when we close our eyes we may be unaware of all the internal photons that are continuously sensed in our eyes, or the constant noise or ringing happening in the background. On the other hand, we may be aware but not conscious of some sensations, such as when we sit we may be aware but not conscious of the chair and our body pushing against each other, or while living in a big city we may get used to noise, thus being aware but not conscious of it.
  18. Since the above quotes may be difficult to understand, I will interpret them in order to explain why I consider this a failure on Smith's part. In the quote Merleau-Ponty meant that a thing that caused no sensations cannot exist, and Reid meant that a thing that caused no sensations can exist. To be fair Merleua-Ponty should be considered a realist and Reid an idealist, the opposite of Smith's evaluations of them. On a related note, Smith believes that insects (and presumably other animals, except humans) don't feel sensations. This is absurd.
  19. A. D. Smith's biggest failure that I've noticed so far is that he thinks of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as an idealist based on this quote: And then states that Thomas Reid is a realist and quotes him thus:
  20. An explanation of the cause of an illusion, from my point of view, is that a contrast causes sense data integrated into perception to disintegrate or break apart, dividing them into ones that remain unaffected because of their closeness to some features of perception and those that have changed through the contrast.
  21. There are too many good points in that book, so I cannot share all of them, but here are two salient ones that at least relate, through criticism, to naive realism, which is how Oism is usually portrayed by its opponents: The idea here that the author is trying to communicate is that illusory sensation is a replacement of real sensation characterized by its conflict with perception itself, although it is contained in it because it affects perception, even though our brains modify the input as well. In other words, the difference is that integration of all sense data is not achieved when perception is "infected" (author's word) by illusion. Rather, what you get is the same as in popular illusions: there is a mix of sense data that correspond to "normal" (another author's word) perception and ones that do not, regardless of whether they are modified by our subjects or not.
  22. I've just started reading this excellent, excellent book, so I am already very impressed, thank you very much for the recommendation! The only issue I have so far is with his first passage on Kant: There are two issues actually. First, from the quote, he seems to think that Kant somehow defended Newton's conception of objective space in KrV, which is false, as you've shown in your article. The second issue is that there is not little but no perception in Kant's latest edition of KrV, as I've shown previously.
  23. Perhaps this is an even better demarcation of the term energy: Material energy Kinetic energy Potential energy Real energy Vacuum energy Binding energy Ideal energy Dark matter Dark energy
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